Robert D. Douglas Jr., Eagle Scout Elder and Adventurer, Dies at 103

Robert Dick Douglas Jr., who joined the Boy Scouts on his 12th birthday in 1924 and by 17 had shot a lion on safari in Africa, hunted whales and grizzly bears in Alaska and written two books on his adventures, died on Wednesday in Greensboro, N.C. He was 103 and one of the nation’s oldest Eagle Scouts.

His son Robert 3rd, who confirmed the death, said he had been hospitalized since Dec. 17 with pneumonia and congestive heart failure.

A lawyer in Greensboro for 70 years, Mr. Douglas was the great-grandson of Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic senator from Illinois who defeated the Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln after a historic series of debates in 1858, two years before Lincoln won the presidency.

Long before the likes of Indiana Jones, young Dick Douglas was charged by a rhinoceros in Tanganyika, went whaling off Kodiak Island, killed bears climbing into an active volcano in Alaska and flew with Amelia Earhart in an early helicopter. He became an F.B.I. agent, learned to water-ski at 40 and wrote four books.

Scouting, he said, gave him an appetite for adventure. “The Boy Scout program is broad enough to meet the notions of any boy,” he told NewsObserver.com, the website of The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., in 2012, when he turned 100. “And for me, if I was interested in athletics, I could focus on that. Then if I was interested in bird studies, I could do that. It filled my life with the right things.”

Many young Americans today may find it hard to fathom how important it was to a boy, nearly a century ago, to help an elderly person cross a street. But in Mr. Douglas’s youth, that reflected loyalty to a code of honor whose rewards were not just merit badges but experience and pride of accomplishment.

In an era when scouts were nearly all middle-class or privileged white boys who went on camping trips and could only dream of storybook quests in faraway lands, Dick was an intrepid enthusiast. He became an Eagle, scouting’s highest rank, in December 1925, according to Deron Smith, a spokesman for the Boy Scouts of America.

In 1928, when he was not yet 16, he and two other Eagles were chosen from 700 high-achieving scouts (out of a national enrollment of 600,000) to accompany two big-game hunters on a five-week safari in Tanganyika, a former African state, and write a book about it — an idea of James E. West, then the chief executive of the Boy Scouts, and the publisher George Palmer Putnam. This led to a surge of interest in scouting and a book that eventually sold some 400,000 copies.

With the hunter-filmmakers Martin and Osa Johnson, Dick and his companions, David R. Martin Jr. of Austin, Minn., and Douglas L. Oliver of Atlanta, saw great herds of migrating zebra and wildebeest; thousands of impala, giraffe and eland; and hundreds of lions, leopards, cheetahs, jackals and hyenas.

In what is now the Serengeti National Park of Tanzania, they filmed and photographed landscapes and animals and encountered hunters with poison-tipped arrows, towering termite mounds, lions feasting on kills, flapping vultures and flat-topped acacia trees stained orange by dust.

A charging rhino shot by Mrs. Johnson fell dead 20 feet from the boys. A leopard leapt out of a tree overhead. Hoping for close photos, they spent a terrifying night alone in the wire-caged back of a truck, under siege by seven hungry lions they had lured with the bloody carcass of a zebra.

As on any safari then, the boys killed game — impala, a wart hog, a cheetah and a water buffalo. Each also tracked, shot and killed a lion and took the skin home. Kills for trophies or sport were common, and they expressed no remorse in “Three Boy Scouts in Africa: On Safari With Martin Johnson,” published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1928.

“Somehow, one doesn’t feel the same about shooting a lion as about killing an innocent little Tommie,” they wrote, referring to a Thomson gazelle. “When one considers the amount of game lions kill each night and the cruelty with which they go about it, there is no self-reproach about shooting the murderer.”

Image

Mr. Douglas, left, and two other Eagle Scouts in 1928 on a safari in Africa with the American anthropologist Osa Johnson, center. He said scouting gave him an appetite for adventure.CreditTopical Press Agency/Getty Images

The book, taken from the boys’ journals and polished by editors, reflected the racial insensitivity of the day. It called adult natives “boys” and quoted the Johnsons as telling the scouts to “let the boys” set up camp. The Americans expressed discomfort at the arrangements.

“In a safari, there are plenty of these ‘boys’; two or three personal servants, gun bearers, porters, and skinners,” they wrote. “Of course they are grown men,” adding: “In all our experiences on hikes and in Boy Scout camps back at home, we had always done most of the work. So it did not feel natural to stand around while the natives pitched camp.”

After the safari, Mr. Douglas enrolled at Georgetown University. He was offered another book deal by Putnam after a year at college and sailed to Kodiak Island, off Alaska’s southeast coast, where he hunted grizzlies and whales. In “A Boy Scout in the Grizzly Country” (1929), he told of an expedition on a whaler that took a humpback and a 40-ton blue whale, both shot by a deck harpoon gun with explosive charges.

Through Mr. Putnam, his publisher, Mr. Douglas met Earhart, the pioneering aviator, whose book “20 Hrs., 40 Min.,” a journal of her experience as the first female passenger on a trans-Atlantic flight, was published in 1928, the same year as “Three Boy Scouts in Africa.” She married Mr. Putnam in 1931, a year before she became the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo.

Mr. Douglas and Earhart accompanied each other on book-signing tours. In 1931, they flew from Washington to New York in an autogiro, the vertical-ascent aircraft she was developing.

In 1931, Mr. Douglas, again with a Putnam contract, undertook another Alaska expedition, this one with the Rev. Bernard R. Hubbard, the Jesuit geologist and explorer, known as “the Glacier Priest,” who studied volcanoes and popularized the Alaskan wilderness in the 1930s.

Weeks after the eruption of the volcano Aniakchak on the Alaska Peninsula opposite Kodiak Island, Father Hubbard rendezvoused with Mr. Douglas and two other college students and climbed to the crater rim, killing bears and caribou on the way. They explored the still-active volcano’s interior for a month. Mr. Douglas recounted the events in his third book, “In the Land of the Thunder Mountains” (1932).

Robert Dick Douglas Jr. was born in Greensboro on July 23, 1912, the second of four children of Robert Douglas and the former Virginia Land Brown. His father was active in scouting, and Robert followed his lead. He graduated from public schools in Greensboro.

At Georgetown, Mr. Douglas earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1932, a master’s in English and philosophy in 1933 and a law degree in 1936. He paid for his education with his book royalties.

In the late 1930s he joined the Greensboro law firm of his father, a former North Carolina attorney general. From 1941 to 1945, Mr. Douglas was an F.B.I. agent in Washington.

He married Gladys Iva Neal in 1942. They had three children before her death in 1971. In 1972 he married Ruth Mullen Sheehy, a widow with five children. Besides his second wife and his son Robert 3rd, Mr. Douglas is survived by two other children, Ann Kohn and Elizabeth Hickman; five stepchildren, Ann Marie Bolen, Susan Cole, and James, Paul and Thomas Sheehy; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

After World War II, Mr. Douglas returned to his father’s firm, where he specialized in labor law. He lectured occasionally on his scouting experiences.

Like all Eagle Scouts, he retained the rank for life, a distinction held by two million since its inception in 1912. Only a very small percentage of scouts attain the rank, which requires 21 merit badges in citizenship, leadership and other tests, including a community service project.

Besides his three adventure books, Mr. Douglas wrote a memoir, “The Best 90 Years of My Life” (2007). “I have looked with awe on Niagara Falls,” he wrote. “I have seen glaciers and mountains in Alaska. I have seen great slow rivers, endless oceans, and the African veldt at sundown, covered with half a million wild animals as far as you can see.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D6 of the New York edition with the headline: Robert D. Douglas Jr., Eagle Scout Elder, Dies at 103. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Sign up for California Today

The news and stories that matter to Californians (and anyone else interested in the state), delivered weekday mornings.